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Domestic Furnishings

Washboards, armchairs, lamps, and pots and pans may not seem to be museum pieces. But they are invaluable evidence of how most people lived day to day, last week or three centuries ago. The Museum's collections of domestic furnishings comprise more than 40,000 artifacts from American households. Large and small, they include four houses, roughly 800 pieces of furniture, fireplace equipment, spinning wheels, ceramics and glass, family portraits, and much more.

The Arthur and Edna Greenwood Collection contains more than 2,000 objects from New England households from colonial times to mid-1800s. From kitchens of the past, the collections hold some 3,300 artifacts, ranging from refrigerators to spatulas. The lighting devices alone number roughly 3,000 lamps, candleholders, and lanterns.

Eli Terry began to mass-produce his austere but serviceable box clock (See Cat. 317044) in 1816 and immediately proceeded to refine it. The plain box case acquired a pair of slender pillars on the sides, scrollwork on top, and a set of graceful feet. A dial was added, and the lower portion of the glass door was reverse-painted. In the movement, Terry experimented with modifications of the escapement, revised the gear trains, and replaced the rack-and-snail striking mechanism with the more economical count wheel. The result of these efforts, patented in 1823, was another wooden, weight-driven, hour-striking, thirty-hour clock that soon became widely known as the Connecticut pillar-and-scroll clock.

As the design of the clock was perfected, Terry set about organizing its manufacture. Production was underway in 1822. By 1825, Eli Terry, in partnership with his brother Samuel and his sons Eli, Jr., and Henry, was operating three factories, each turning out two to three thousand pillar-and-scroll clocks a year. Originally, Terry's clock cost fourteen dollars, but before long its price dropped to under ten dollars.

Other clockmakers, notably Seth Thomas, soon produced clocks after Terry's design. The output of the new clock industry soon became too large to be absorbed by the local market. Scores of traveling salesmen were dispatched to sell clocks in the rural West and South. "As to the Yankee clocks peddler," reported an English traveler in the 1840s, " in Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and here in every dell of Arkansas and in every cabin where there was not a chair to sit on, there was sure to be a Connecticut clock."

In 1880 Scientific American, enthusiastically recommended Louis P. Juvet's time globe to its readers. It was, the magazine found, "a fit ornament for any library, a valuable adjunct in every business office, and a necessity in every institution of learning." The clockwork-driven globe was undeniably useful for studying geography, determining world time, and illustrating the rotation of the earth. The basis of its appeal, however, was even broader. Prominently displayed in the parlors and drawing rooms of Gilded Age America, the elegant time globe clearly demonstrated the wealth and culture of its owner.

Available in a range of sizes and versions simple and ornate, the time globe consisted of three basic elements: a globe, a mechanism for rotating it, and a base. The globe most often featured a terrestrial map, but celestial globes were also offered. An equatorial ring indicated worldwide time and zones of daylight and darkness. A meridian ring supported a clock dial over the north pole.

Concealed within the globe was a four-day, spring-driven brass movement that drove the clock dial and rotated the globe once every twenty-four hours. Manufactured for Juvet by Rood and Horton of Bristol, Connecticut, the movements featured a lever escapement and a balance wheel. Turning the feather end of the arrow-shaped axis wound the movement.

Precisely when production of the globes began is uncertain. Juvet, a Swiss immigrant and a resident of Glens Falls, New York, first patented a mechanical globe in January 1867, and exhibited one at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876. Probably sometime in 1879, Juvet formed a partnership with James Arkell. By the early 1880s, Juvet and Company of Canajoharie, New York, was making more than sixty varieties of globes. In October 1886, fire consumed the factory where the globes were assembled, ending their manufacture there forever.

This lamp, from about 1900, is a compelling example of Louis Comfort Tiffany's ability to transform a design aesthetic inspired by nature into a fabulous decorative furnishing. The bamboo design is carried throughout the lamp. The dome-shaped 24" shade is constructed of green fibrillated glass with yellow mottling to create long tapering bamboo leaves and shoots against an opalescent geometric panel ground. The bamboo stalks appear to be growing against a wire trellis. The 62" integrated brown patinated bronze sectioned bamboo stem base is topped with a matching bamboo-inspired heat cap with a seedpod finial.

The lamp was a bequest from the estate of Mary Marvin Breckinridge Patterson, a generous Washington philanthropist. Following in the family tradition of supporting charitable, cultural, and preservation organizations, Mrs. Patterson was the source of numerous gifts and donations to the Smithsonian Institution and its museums and libraries. She was the daughter of Isabella Goodrich and attorney John Cabell Breckinridge. Her maternal grandfather was inventor and industrialist B. F. Goodrich. Her paternal great-grandfather was John C. Breckinridge, vice president of the United States and a military figure. She began her career as a freelance photojournalist and filmmaker. One of her first film subjects was the Frontier Nursing Service in Kentucky. During World War II, she was hired by Edward R. Murrow as a staff broadcaster for CBS in Berlin. Her photographs were published in National Geographic, Life and Harper's Bazaar. In 1940 she married American diplomat Jefferson Patterson and took on the role of diplomatic wife.

In 1807, the ship ASIA of Philadelphia was sailing from its homeport to Canton, China bearing a valuable cargo of “specie and goods.” It ran into trouble at the Bocca Tigris strait by the mouth of the Pearl River, en route to Whampoa where the foreign ships trading with Canton anchored. Captain Philip Maughan of the East India Company’s brigantine ANTELOPE assisted in the rescue of the ASIA, which was insured for a very large amount by eleven different insurance companies. The Insurance Company of North America (INA) alone covered $35,000 of the ASIA’s coverage.

In appreciation, the insurers voted in 1809 to purchase a set of fancy silver and present it to Captain Maughan for his role in the ASIA’s rescue, which they did in 1811. In 1942, an inscribed and ornately decorated silver soup tureen from the Maughan silver turned up at a London antique shop, where it was purchased by INA and returned to the firm’s Philadelphia headquarters for display among its company’s historic collections.

In 2005, the CIGNA Corporation, successor to the INA, donated its historic collections, including this piece, to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

A green celluloid vase with a butterscotch flower glued to the front. The vase is in the style of Roseville pottery, which was known for its unusual curves, exotic colors, and mysterious shapes. The Roseville Pottery Company was started in Ohio in 1892.

A rattle in the shape of an ovoid sphere, made of celluloid. One half of the sphere is cream and the other half is peach. A han-painted image of a child decorates one half. The two halves are fitted tightly together and given extra strength by means of a ribbon that is woven around the seam by means of several holes drilled in the sphere. A celluloid ring is attached to the end of the ribbon. A metal bell is inside the sphere. There are no maker's marks.

A blow-molded rattle. Its handle is cream celluloid. The rattle is half a sphere made of multicolored celluloid with a clear plastic cover. Inside are some small plastic pellets to make the rattle sound and two plastic chicks.

Pair of celluloid plastic blanket clips. The clips are flexible rings with rigid extensions. The ends are cut and hand-painted to resemble rosy-cheeked clowns. Clips like these were used to hold blankets in place in a crib.